description_,' is to hold that whilst believing in God Shelley wrote a book to prove there was no God; that whilst believing in the existence of the Deity he set himself deliberately to work, to force other people into pure atheism. I cannot believe with Mr. Garnett, and Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy, that Shelley was capable of such amazing impiety. Nothing is stranger in Shelley's story than that the hardest things said of him should, in so many cases, be uttered by his extravagant idolaters. My conception of the Oxonian Shelley is that he was an impetuous, unruly, combative young scatterbrain; disloyal and deceitful to his parents; certainly capable of falsehood in comparatively small matters to other people; but I cannot believe he could have been so false to his own soul, so prodigiously false to his own convictions on the most awful of all solemn subjects, as to write and seek a publisher for a serious argument against the belief in God, whilst he himself believed in the Deity. Let us see from evidences, known to Mr. Garnett, when he wrote his _Shelley in Pall Mall_, what were some of Shelley's views respecting God, in the Christmas holidays of 1810-11. On 26th December, 1810, he writes to Hogg from Field Place:-- 'Thanks, _truly_ thanks, for opening your heart to me, for telling me your feelings to me. Dare I do the same to you? I dare not to myself, how can I to another, perfect as he may be. I dare not even to God, whose mercy is great.' On 3rd January, 1811, the future poet writes to the same correspondent: 'The word "God," a vague word, has been, and will continue to be, the source of numberless errors, until it is erased from the nomenclature of philosophy. Does it not imply "the soul of the universe, the intelligent and necessarily beneficent, actuating principle." This it is impossible not to believe in. I may not be able to adduce proofs; but, I think, that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are, in themselves, arguments more conclusive than [any] which can be advanced [....] that some vast intellect animates infinity. If we disbelieve this, the strongest argument in support of the existence of a future state instantly becomes annihilated.' Nine days later (12th January, 1811), the future poet writes from Field Place:-- 'I here take God (_and a God exists_) to witness, that I wish torments, which beggar the futile description of a fancied hell, would fall upon me; provided I could attain thereby that happiness for what I love, which, I fear, can never be!... I wish, ardently wish, to be profoundly convinced of the existence of a Deity, that so superior a spirit might derive some degree of happiness from my feeble exertions; for love is heaven, and heaven is love.... I think I can prove the existence of a Deity--a First Cause.'